highly engaging, STEM-rich body of
student activities.
Students in Abuel’s class use Lego
equipment to record temperature, soil
moisture, pH levels of liquids, and
ultraviolet emissions readings. They
make decisions about which environmental factors to measure, which
probes to use, and which approach
would be effective in programming
the mobile robotic processor for the
specific job at hand. Then they use the
processor they build to collect, download, interpret, and report the data,
just like a professional environmental
engineer/scientist would.
Robotics activities provide both meaningful challenges and the means
by which to solve them.
a scenario much like what they would
face if they worked for a real mining
company that wanted to send a robot
through a horizontal shaft to test the
safety of the environment before following it with human workers.
Robotics for Math
Designing and programming a robot
also involves math skills, including
counting, measuring, and estimating—all required learning in prealgebra and beyond. A typical project
might involve constructing a robot
to travel a set distance down a hallway, stopping to take temperature
readings at set intervals of distance,
and recording these measurements.
To accomplish this, students would
need to measure a robot’s wheel circumference, calculate the number of
revolutions required to have the robot
travel a given distance, and use the
icon-based programing software to
direct its movements accordingly. It’s
Robotics for Engineering
Lego Robotics weaves together
subjects that would otherwise be
taught in isolation. Bringing together science, math, and technology gives students exposure to
engineering, which is the practical
application of these subjects to solve
problems. Robotics activities provide both meaningful challenges
and the means by which to solve
them, and they align easily with
the Engineering Design Process, a
framework that NASA recommends
for learning and doing engineering.
This eight-step process begins with
identifying the problem and works
its way through identifying criteria,
brainstorming possible solutions,
generating ideas, exploring possibilities, selecting an approach, building
a prototype or model, and refining
the design for a final solution.
Evan Weinberg taught high school
physics, engineering, and math for
nine years at Lehman High School in
the Bronx, New York City, New York,
USA, and currently teaches at Hang-
zhou International School in Hang-
zhou, China. He’s made extensive use
of Lego Robotics in his engineering
classes, an approach he finds to be
highly effective for teaching engineer-
ing concepts, programming, and the
design process.
